Hacking my home security system: Part 1

December 17, 2015

Having setup my Raspberry Pi 2 for wifi remote headless operations, I needed to connect it to a breadboard and test some rudimentary Python code, to see if I could access the GPIO pins and simulate some door switches. I wrote a simple script to monitor three simulated doors (front, back, and garage), and detect when a connection was broken using a wires from three GPIO pins, leading to a common ground.

With my script results showing when I “opened” doors by pulling appropriate wires off and back on to ground.

Before I hook the breadboard up to “real” door sensors, I will need to determine which leads to connect to the current DSC system strip to which house sensors.

In the meantime I will switch gears and work on my “Ruby on Rails” (RoR) system interface, which will be running on a separate Debian based server. The plan is to have the Pi based system continually monitoring the state of available house security sensors, and reporting the state to the RoR based server for alerting via the GUI web interface, and emails/texts to my iOS devices. Here is a preliminary view of the home screen for that GUI interface.

In the next post I will show status of the GUI development, communication between the pi and the server, and preliminary connections between the breadboard and the DSC sensors.